It is known in the art relating to medical dressings for the protection and securement of catheters to apply a dressing to a patient's skin to cover a catheter insertion site at which the catheter punctures a patient's skin. It is also common for medical clinicians (i.e., doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel) to alternatively or additionally apply strips of medical grade tape to attempt to secure the catheter or associated medical tubing. Another conventional clinical practice is to suture a catheter hub to a patient's skin to roughly secure the catheter to the patient. Further still, a variety of catheter and medical tubing securement devices are available for use in the medical field. These securement devices, however, are often bulky and cumbersome, hard to dress with a dressing, and may have costly and complex mechanical features.
Although a wide variety of medical dressings and catheter and tubing securement devices are commercially available, individual clinicians tend to prefer to use one or a few dressings and securement devices for multiple and often unintended applications. Therefore, the dressing or securement device used is often too big or too small for the insertion site and surrounding bodily contours, or may simply have a design structure that is functionally incompatible with the application. This self-customization by clinicians therefore leads to poor catheter securement and protection.
Furthermore, it is also known in the medical field that poorly dressed and poorly secured catheters and associated tubing are likely to undesirably lead to irritation of the insertion site, necessitating movement of the catheter to a new insertion site. Even worse, poorly secured catheters are susceptible to accidental dislodgement from the insertion site. For example, medical tubing connected to indwelling catheters, infusion needles and the like is often subjected to inadvertent but significant pulling forces either caused directly by patient movement or by snagging of the tubing on other objects. These pulling forces peel the medical tape or dressing securing the catheter and/or tubing off the patient's skin. This exposes the catheter, infusion needle, etc. to movement inward or outward, increasing the likelihood that the catheter, infusion needle, etc. will fail and have to be replaced and inserted into a new insertion site. Also, this may weaken the adhesion between the dressing and the patient's skin, potentially exposing the insertion site to harmful bacteria.